Slashdot Mirror
Still More 'Copy Protected' CDs
maniac11 writes: "This story describes new CDs planned on being released by Universal Music Group that sport anti-copying technology. Not much in the way of actual details, but a heads up on a new plan to foil." Same price, worse product -- higher sales! Universal seems to be the first company to commit to downgrading its entire lineup over the next six months or so.
Lets hope it isn't like those Michael Jackson CDs.. wait a minute.. depending on the music, LETS hope for it ;-)
These products should absolutely be labelled as "non-compatible" with the CD standard if they in any way are not compatible with other CD usages.
This includes playing on a computer. Many of the other "copy protection" schemes make it impossible to use them on a computer of any sort. Others degrade sound quality.
If they're not clearly labelled as such, I could see lawsuits over mis-representation of the product.
INIAL, IAJAMC.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Only to the rippers, my friend, only to the rippers. The average "Joe Public" could care less.
Ask your mom if she cares that she can't copy it to her computer or an MP3 player.
"Can I still copy it to a cassette tape to play in my Suburban?"
"Yes, mom."
"Then how is it 'broken'?"
BTW, SJ Mercury has a good story on this too.
sulli
RTFJ.
The only thing you can do when a vendor is providing a defective product is not purchase it. So, stop purchasing CDs, DVDs or other copy protected material. Encourage everyone you know to stop purchasing the same.
Otherwise, all you are doing is encouraging them to produce defective products.
..It'll be said again:
Return faulty products for refund or exchange. The marketplace rules, and if enough people return these cd's this technology goes to an early grave.
air and light and time and space
I buy a lot of records. Most of the stuff that I get isn't available on CD. What I think would be really cool is if companies putting out vinyl would give me a cd with mp3s of the songs on the records so I didn't have to rip them. I would end up buying a lot more stuff then.
Obviously the big record companies have no interest in doing this as they are more committed to maintaining their monopolies then providing a legitamate service, but it would be pretty dope if indie labels started doing that.
Fsck the millennium, we want it now.
Millennium Crisis Line: 0890 900 2000 [calls cost 50p/min]
The majority of consumers will never know the difference. The only people the record companies are offending here are the "geeks" who play CDs in their computers. Unfortunately, we're not the largest chunk of the consumer base (right now, it's teenagers), so they really don't give a rat's butt. The record companies are of the impression that we're not worth their time, since we take all the CDs and make illegal copies of them (heavy sarcasm alert).
I for one think it's exceptionally unethical to muck with standards like this. Of course, someone will figure a way to work around it, and the files will end up out there anyway. Those files will probably get pirated more just out of spite. The best thing any of us can do is boycott any "modified" CDs like this, and tell our friends to do so as well. It's been said before, speak with your wallet. That's what I intend to do.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
Good point. Here is a question... Do they lose the ability to have the "Compact Disc" logo on thier case?
"Dude, sweet tunes! When did you buy the new XXXXXXX album?"
"Oh, I didn't buy it. I downloaded it. I woulda bought it, but you can't play CD's in your computer any more."
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Yeah. Seeing as how I play CDs through my DVD player which has a digital coax out into my receiver, I'll be in touch with my lawyer with a quickness if I run into a CD that restricts my ability to listen to music that I've bought on my home system.
Someone needs to reverse-engineer these systems and release their findings in an encrypted format. You'll have violated the DMCA, but they'll have violated the DMCA proving it.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
I might be just a little pissed off if I was part
of a company marketing high-end home and car cd players
that utilized cd-rom drives and now Universal
decides to make their disks such that they won't
play on my head units and players...
I would be all about lawsuits for lost business
and research
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Seriously, I have bought maybe 15 cds in the past 3 years. Three of those were replacements of cds I'd have for years had been remastered, and the rest were by bands that allow me and others like me to freely record and trade their live concerts. Radiohead and U2 are two big name acts that have recently figured out that people who trade their concerts are more likely to buy their albums and attend their concerts than someone who doesn't trade.
Check out the links above, there is something for all tastes. There is plenty of music to be had for the price of your bandwidth and blank CDs.
newsflash: Anything I can listen to, I can record. You can too!
Checkout This Incredible Idea: Run a cable from your portable cd player to the audio-in on your computer. Play+Record the track. Run resulting file through mp3 encoder. Viola, you now have an mp3 of a 'protected' cd. Sure, it isn't a digital extraction from the cd, but I bet the average mp3-downloader couldn't tell the difference anyway.
All it takes is one person getting a decent recording of the cd for it to get in circulation on p2p servivices like gnutella.
If you can download these copy-protected cd's for free anyway, then the copy protection is worthless!
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
How will this affect car audio systems? I know alot them can play burned CD-R's and CD-RW's as well as pulling data like track names off, so I assume that they use the same type of drive as a computer does.
Also, most of the old CD-Rom drives, as well as some new ones, have stereo miniplugs for headphones in the front, will you be able to play these cd's through that? I doubt it based on the previous reports of "no disc detected" but you never know.
I think most people buy cd's to listen to in their car anyway, or at least, that's where the majority of music listening takes place, so if they're not compatible with car audio then the industry is going to have a lot of irate consumers on their hands.
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
Now, obviously the Slashdot vibe is that this is a flawed model for making music, and I'm inclined to agree. That is why you should be supporting independent artists who don't pull this copy-protection bullshit on their listeners. The media cartel only exists because people keep fueling it and voting with their dollars; if we want to beat it, we need to make our own content. Support independent films, musicians, and other artists who do their work for the love of it. Hell, make your own music and give it away on the Internet; there's bound to be somebody who likes it, no matter what it is. Hell, there are people who like listening to white noise.
As long as you continue to buy mainstream CDs and DVDs, you are going to have to take whatever copy-protection measures the publishers decide to incorporate. If you don't like their terms, take your money elsewhere. That's how our society works.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
Their defense would probably be that the intention of the CDs they are selling is to be used to play music in a standard CD music player. No where is it stated that they have to allow non-musical-playback purposes.
If the argument is then that they are degrading audio quality, you have to prove that audio quality is degraded. It's not that hard to design the intentional errors so that the interpolation produces the value that would normally be in the music (or very close to it).
I highly doubt that an A/B test would be able to find the difference to any ears.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If the industry is losing billions to copying, and they've made it impossible, we can expect to see prices fall to say $4.99, right? Or were they lying about napster....
According to this, the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo can only be used "on discs complying with the CD-DA specification: IEC 60908 and/or the Philips-Sony Compact Disc Digital Audio System Description) also known as the RED Book)."
Someone set up a domain. "CopyproofCDs.org" or something. Make a list of every copy-proof CD out there.
Then we need to get people to sign up and deliberately go out and buy them.
Here's the fun part.
Once you've bought them and opened them up, return them.
Do this ad nauseum. On your way home from work or school, on the way to the store, or when you're at the mall. Just return a copy. They'll have to throw it out. Ask for another copy of the same album. Bring in a laptop to prove to them that it doesn't play in your computer. What can they do? They HAVE to give you your money back or give you a new copy of the damned CD.
Now, if we get THOUSANDS of people doing this -- and we can, this is slashdot we're talking about -- record companies will soon realize that there's NO money to be made in copy-proof CDs.
Good idea?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
How about we return it for a refund? If enough people did that they'd have to stop!
You know, I bet we could just take the digital-out of the cdplayer and pipe it into our soundcard....
Even a D-A-D conversion would be a little lossy, but after that we could copy as much as we wanted.
Damn those RIAA bastards to hell! They're releasing defective CDs!
These go against the redbook standard. For shame.
Hey, I think I'm witty! I'll make a list of all the comments that people will make in the article because that's all people ever say in these articles! Oh, wait....
-Denor
Since this copy protection method works by throwing in errors which (most) CD players will simply interpolate over, won't this make these CDs much less tolerant to scratches & fingerprints? If this is the case, this would be a pretty big reason to stay away from these CDs. Blah. Time to invest in a new needle for my phonograph...
The reason why the record industry is doing poorly is because they sued Napster and shut them down. I used Napster to listen to music I liked but couldn't find on the radio. If I liked a song enough I went out and actually bought the CD that the song existed on. It isn't enough for me to download the song onto the one machine I have dedicated for that task, I wanted to be able to listen to the whole CD and that meant that I bought it.
The music industry shuts down Napster, which automatically makes me angry at the music industry. So I stop buying CD's from the music industry. Not only that, but I also stop buying things I can copy music onto. Like blank CDs and disk drives and such. Those companies loose sales because not only do I stop buying CDs, but also so did two million other people. This means that probably a dozen, maybe two dozen companies suddenly can't pay their bills. They start laying off people and maybe they go out of business and maybe they just scale back but the fact is, they are in a recession. So those dozen or two dozen companies employ something like a quarter of a million people and of those maybe something like fifty thousand are now out of work. Those people now half to scale back on everything if they don't want to loose what they still have. No to mention the 200,000 people that are still working but are now terrified that they are next. But these people aren't the only ones who are scared. People read about it in the newspapers and they begin to think: "I don't think I'm going to buy that new cell phone today. I can afford it, but God, look at the economy." Before you know it we are in a full scale recession. This is because some record executive was afraid he might loose sales on CDs for Twisted Sister or Metallica.
They have their cause and effect really screwed up. They say, "It's all those people out there copying this stuff that's hurting us." It isn't that. Most people I know are fairly honest and if they make copies its almost always for themselves to use on some medium the record company didn't think of. Most people aren't buying music from these companies because they see how much the artists and the companies themselves hate their customers. It is this contempt for their customers that has put them in this pickle. Now they grind salt into their own self inflicted wounds and make it so that you can only copy onto a blank CD. This ought to make there customers happy.
Beware the wood elf!!!
The Compact Disc logo is owned by Phillips.
g os .html
http://www.licensing.philips.com/cdsystems/cdlo
The right to use the logo is as follows:
"This logo may be used on discs complying with the CD-DA specification: IEC 60908 and/or the Phillips-Sony Compact Disc Digital Audio System Description (also known as the RED Book)"
Players have similar restrictions. So if the disc dosen't play on your "Compact Disc" labeled device and it is labeled "Compact Disc" one of them is lying, or the spec is too loose.
Audiophile labels still produce a ton of vinyl. There are even some major artists who's records are available on vinyl; R.E.M. and Radiohead both come to mind. As a matter of fact, every single album R.E.M. has ever released is availble in vinyl from Amazon.com.
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
Philips does, and according to the rules stated in the rule book on their web site:
This logo may only be used on discs complying with the CD-DA specification: IEC 60908 and/or the Philips-Sony Compact Disc Digital Audio System Description (also known as the RED Book)
Interesting to see how that turns out. I mean, they're bastardizing a published standard and selling the product as compatible with that standard. Jeez, if they weren't all in the same bed, I'd expect Phillips to sue them ;)
Sure you can. The DVD-Audio standard allows for audible watermarking, which is exactly what is being done to standard CDs. SACDs are much different. They are watermarked, but the information is stored in the Text area and TOC. The audio is not affected like it is with DVD-Audio
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
If there's one thing this argument needs, it's a catchy label. If copy-prevention on CD's get slapped with a 'downgrade' label, it'll be dead before it gets any momentum. Joe Sixpack will NEVER stand for it and the media will have a field day demonstrating car stereos and home computers balking at the latest N'Sync CD.
We should push this rhetoric HARD.
Let's not forget about Dave Matthews Band. They had the foresight to pass on several offers from record companies because they wanted one of them to guarantee them the right to allow their fans to record concerts and swap songs. For that reason, while I have not bought a new CD in months, and don't intend to, I will make a small exception to my boycott and buy them -- assuming they don't allow copy protection to be foisted off on their CDs, in which case, I'll have to take a pass on that, too, since I almost exclusively listen to them on my box while working.
Am I bad for business? I've bought every album, some more than once because of mishap, plus their bio CD and a pair of DVDs (one was videos, one was a concert). I've also been to two of their concerts and would gladly go to another, and snap up their professionally recorded live albums eagerly.
Sony Music Entertainment recently said the CD of Michael Jackson's new single "You Rock My World" was distributed to European radio stations with protection software after the song started showing up on the Internet.
I think it's funny that the author of the story chose to point out the absurdity of this sequence of events in this subtle way.
What were the record execs thinking? "Hey, everyone who wanted to pirate a copy of this Michael Jackson song already has. In retaliation, let's hurt our paying customers! That will show 'em!"
That's not closing the barn door after the horse has gone - that's setting fire to the barn to teach it a lesson.
The only thing I think this might prohibit is digital audio extraction - if you're using the S/PDIF output of a CD ROM drive, you should get the full digital info, just at 1X speed. Full digital quality, no loss. The audio portion (like the headphone out jack and digital audio out via S/PDIF) is independent of the IDE interface. Once it starts playing, it just keeps going.
I don't see how they could hobble the normal playback mode of a CD ROM - is this actually the case, or do they just hamper direct digital extraction? I just haven't had the slightest urge to buy a Michael Jackson or Charley Pride CD to try this out...
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Okay...the latest tripe gets shipped to Blockbuster, Best Buy, etc...
:)
They put it on the shelves right in alphabetical order where it should be. Do you really think the consumers will care if it says "Compact Disc Digital Audio" on it? As long as it's in a jewel case the size of a CD, it won't matter.
I'm looking at Pink Floyd's "A Momentary Lapse of Reason" right now. Nowhere on the outside, which you would see in the store, does it say anything about it being a CD. I see it in 4 places as soon as I open the case, but I also see this shiny metal disc which I assume is the CD, even if it didn't say so
Yeah...it would be a way to sue them if they marked them as such, but it's not gonna hurt them if they don't.
It is clearly stated in the documentation for cd players dvd players, cd-rom drives etc. that they are compatible with any disc bearing the cd digital audio logo.
And these discs still are compatible with CD-ROM players -- as long as you play audio. You only run into trouble when you try and pull digital data from them. There is no guarantee that CDs are free from digital defects. In fact, the standard specifically allows digital defects.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
"Hey, Mom, would you care if you can't play CDs on your computer?"
"Uh, YES, don't you remember? That's how I play all my CDs."
"Hey, Dad, would you care that you can't rip CDs to your computer?"
"Well, yes, because I copy all my CDs to MP3s so I don't need a CD changer to listen to them in sequence."
I suppose my parents may be weird though. After all, my Dad listens to country... (and he's got *all* his CDs on his computer as MP3s, but then again, he works for Digital - er, Compaq - er, HP). My Mom does some work with editting webpages, so I guess she can be considered a "technical" type.
But I know many people who I wouldn't consider a "nerd" who use their computer to play CDs straight. And they'll be mightly pissed if they can't listen to their new CDs on their $2000 laptop...
Don't forget, computers are slowly becoming "entertainment centers." My Mom basically gave up on her little CD player she used to use to play CDs and now (would) play her CDs via her CD-ROM drive -- except that she uses AudioGalaxy now. (And the incident with the CD-ROM door being stuck shut. Ignoring that...) Her computer sounds better than her small "portable stereo."
My sister (who is definately not a tech-type at all) uses her computer to play CDs - which, considering she only uses it for homework any other time should tell you something. (Although she has a "real" CD-player now she uses instead. It's a portable CD-player with headphones which is the real selling point.)
Many people who own a computer - a growing portion of the population - especially in the "pop music" set - end up playing CDs through it. Sometimes it's because the computer is in a separate room from the stereo and they want to listen to music while doing homework. Sometimes it's because they want to rip the 2-CD set and listen straight through them without swapping disks.
Legal digital music is becoming a way of life for the "younger" generation. Go through practically any college and you'll find that most of the music pumping these days is either a mix CD or straight MP3s being played through a high-fi stereo system. (With more colleges requiring computers, college students stick with the tool that works - if we can't spend $500 on a stereo, we'll use the $1000 computer we had to get instead...) It may not be near 50% of music listeners yet, but it's at least 10% - which is a lot of listeners to potentially permentantly alienate.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I only used Napster (and other such MP3 services and so forth) to aquire music that was impossible to find in stores, thus buy, or to download music from artists that had said they supported their fans sharing music in that manner.
Last year I spent >$200 on CDs. The RIAA certainly made money off of me. However, now the RIAA wants to curtail my ability of fair use? Naturally, I'll be less inclined to buy CDs I can't use in all of my players. Not to mention that I consider these CDs that are "protected" to be defective. Of course, I might be inclined to buy again if I can have a tool to bypass their schemes (which will more than likely be illegal under the DMCA).
Case in point. I don't want to buy CDs that are defective (either intentionally or not). RIAA is losing my business by curtailing my ability to listen to my CD in the format I choose.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
And its our right to make fair use of a product by overriding their protection measures. We have as much right to override them as they do to put them there. It is NOT like breaking into someone's house, there you are breaking a protection system (lock, etc) to do something intrinsically illegal. Breaking copy protection to infringe is illegal, but doing so to make fair use shouldn't be. Fair use is legal.
(If some random person, not acting on orders from the local gov't, padlocks the public park, it would be legal to break that bogus lock. And the one that put the lock there would likely be in trouble. It would be nice if obstructing fair use were similarly illegal.)
Even the DMCA itself says it doesn't affect fair use. Anything that violates fair use is also unconstitutional.
Of course, Judge Kaplan ignores all that (DeCSS case), and he isn't the only one out there.
So we morally, and according to the letter of the law as I understand it, have the right for "self-help" to get back fair use, but not according to the gov't. As they can assess monetary penalties and even lock you up, we need to keep in mind that we need more than just a technical solution.
We need to repeal the DMCA.
Of course, anyone that knows of a defeat method or code, please do let us know.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Sorry to reply to my own post - I found further information from Phillips on licensing terms for their patented CD-DA technology:
l 00 131.pdf
http://www.licensing.philips.com/partner/data/s
It basically says that if you pay the license fee, you can use the logo. Nothing in it says that your CD _must_ meet their standard, only that in order to produce a CD using their patented technology, you must agree to their terms which include money, money and more money.
This is far from definitive, but it would seem that a company could license their technology, produce compact discs with the tm logo, but as long as you keep up with the license fees, Phillips and Sony probably wouldn't care if you mangled the layout.
If your idea if winning includes statuatory damages of $250 (MINIMUM) to $2500, actual monetary damages (i.e. whatever they hoodwink the judge into thinking you cost them), and possibly 5 years in prison (NO PAROLE ALLOWED IN FEDERAL PRISON) if you at all financially benefitted (*) from it, yeah, in that case, I'd say we have a good chance of winning.
* In the copyright law "financially benefit" has been redefined to include non-monetary benefits!
See the DMCA and how Judge Kaplan interprets it as removing fair use in the DeCSS trial (*) for more info.
(*) The DeCSS defendants have been ORDERED TO PAY COURT COSTS, i.e. ordered to pay the court for their own persecution by the court. It would be like me throwing a rock and you and billing you for the cost of the rock.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
It stands to reason that the biggest enemy of these non-standard CDs has to be the consumer electronics industry. They've seen a huge sales of burners, players, software, blanks, labels and all the other paraphernalia that goes with the make-your-own-CD revolution.
Limiting or preventing ripping of CDs seems like a real threat to not just Johnny Digital's passtime but of those in the electronics industry whose livlihood relies on consumers legitimately being able to rip CDs.
How soon until they fire back with firmware upgrades or other hardware hacks that overcome the copy protection gimmicks? And how will the music industry respond when this stuff is sold with the claim "Now compatible with new CDS!"?
7.5 IPS is far more common. 30 IPS players had too much trouble with Wow and Flutter. Plus the trade off between resolution and capacity is too drastic. It's like the difference between encoding at 360Kbps and 160. For reference, the average car casette is 1.875 IPS.
60 Minute tape @ 1.875 IPS =
15 Minute tape @ 7.5 IPS =
2 Minute tape @ 30 IPS.
It is far more common to improve resolution by writing fewer tracks. Also, the tape manufacturing has come a long way...
BTW, The real problem with digital is it's unnatural reaction to saturation. They try to combat this with the High and Low pass filters, but the result is not satisfactory.
The history of music signal processing is all about trying to re-create the limitations of earlier equipment. Your distortion pedal mimics an overheated tube, compressor mimics less than ideal tape media.
Digital Mixing is the most popular form of music editing. It is so much more flexible than good old analog. Even those who still use the analog processes do it either in a "studio-live" environment where no extensive editing will need to be done after, or mix the tracks digital to get a final draft, and then mix the final track from the analog.
This is why the first Kent State memorial song came out almost 2 months later, while Tom Petty's Rondney King riot song only took 9 days. On a side note, they sang about the terrible riots, but not about the savage beating he recieved at the hands of some overzealous cops.
~Hammy
The pathetic thing is that I can rip those tracks to HDD, then burn them to CD instead of making a full copy of the CD, and it will play! So much for copy "protection."
As an audio purist ever in search of better sound quality, the very idea of purposely degrading my signal source with digital fingerprints and copy protection is just pushing me to buy fewer and fewer CDs. I am not willing to pay for damaged goods, and I can't see how messing with my audio source can be viewed as anything but damaging.
As to piracy, I own a grand total of one pirated CD -- a copy of Willie Dixon's "Gingerale Afternoon" that I haven't been able to find anywhere in over 5 years. (At least not for a sane price -- there are a couple online shops that are willing to sell me a copy for $27+shipping.)
There are another 5-10 CDs that I'd pirate for the same reason, but I can't even find someone who owns an original, much less a place to buy those albums.
On the downside, my reduced purchases have absolutely no impact on the big labels as most of my purchases are from much smaller studios like Blind Pig Records. Odds are these smaller companies don't have the volume to invest in so-called copy-protection technologies, but if they farm out the AD conversion and manufacture to bigger companies I'll end up having to skip their products as well.
For those using the so-called CD player in their computer, if you actually cared about the music you'd spring for a CD portable regardless of the copy protection issue. The players built into a computer have so much signal interference and low-quality chip amps that they just aren't worth listening to!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Not buying achieves nothing. No-one will notice. Your sacrifice only serves to lower your own quality of life.
What I'm thinking you should do is buy CDs. Take them home and rip them. If they don't rip, take them back and get a refund. This FORCES the store to take notice, and data on the number of returns goes all the way up the distribution chain to the asshole execs who try to work out exactly how unethical a policy they can get away with.
I'm new to this country and don't know much about consumer rights laws here. Given that CD stores are reluctant to take back used CDs (and sometimes have a policy against it), it would be useful for us to know our rights. That the CD violates your right to format-shift might be sufficient grounds that they cannot legally refuse the refund, as might the misrepresentation of the product looking like a CD but not playing in all CD players. I don't know.
If someone like the EFF could get a lawyer to write a page explaining our consumer rights with regards to these degraded-CDs, that would be very useful. It may be that the matter is legally grey and we wait for the results of lawsuits. In which case, it's up to us to not take "no" for an answer when demanding our money back.
If CDs were copy protected, would most people rip them by attaching their CD players to sound cards? Probably not. And not because of the quality, but because of the effort required. Consider this:
Ripping a CD to MP3s involves: (a) fetching track names automatically from freedb, (b) reading the audio off the CD (much faster than playing it) into separate files and (c) making MP3/ogg files.
Ripping a recording from line in involves (a) recording the whole damned thing at real time, (b) cutting it into separate tracks (no track info, remember), (c) hand-naming the files and making playlists. Takes a lot longer and requires more effort. I've done it once for a live recording from a MiniDisc, and it's not something I'd want to do for every CD I wish to listen to on my computer.
Of course, the payoff for going to this Herculean effort would be the kudos you get from all the mp3 l33ch3z when you upload it for the taking. So, in effect, copy-protected CDs would punish honest home-rippers and encourage file-sharing mp3 d00dz.